(Note. We have swapped my photo for the cartoon character. I hope you like it!)
Hello and welcome to our latest blog post.
I am really pleased you have come back to see our latest news!
This blog post will be very short so we have not created an audio.
Please note that this blog post is particularly technical and is addressed to technical people.
We did think about putting it only on BIDA Brains but we felt we would put it here as well.
For business people this post means:
You can ask your operational systems any question you like as long as it can handle the processing of the query.
Now that we have published everything needed to create “Meta5 as a Black Box” we just needed to test one last thing to make sure all was ok.
That test was to make sure Common Table Expressions worked from Meta5 to SQL Server.
Of course, we expected it to work, but we have to make sure by testing anyway.
So for all you technical people out there?
We have tested the CTE required to produce the Business Central Chart of Accounts report.
You can download the code from the button below.
Please note we formatted the SQL using Notepad++.
You might want to use Notepad++ to read it to get the spacing correct.
The way we did this was as follows.
We turned on SQL Tracing and then ran the Chart of Accounts report.
We captured the SQL sent into SQL Server.
We then translated it to use the Direct Query table and column names we have defined.
We created the query using both outer apply and left joins.
We got the same result with both queries.
However, we are only using the demo database so there could still be errors in it.
Please note. In the Business Central report, the report itself creates the summaries for the parent GL Accounts.
So our CTE query includes the work to create the summaries for the parent GL Accounts.
What does this mean for technical people like you?
This means that you can use “Meta5 as a Black Box” to send any CTE query into any database that supports it and get the result back.
Basically, because CTEs can be so complex, you can get virtually any answer from any database that supports CTEs.
The obvious constraint is that running the query does not interfere with other processing the database is required to be doing.
This means “Meta5 as a Black Box” + CTEs + Excel / PowerBI can produce a very large array of reports from operational systems without the need to create the data warehouse first.
Sure, this is not a replacement for the data warehouse proper.
This is a way to create Excel / PowerBI reports by querying operational data where the interference on the operational processing is tolerable.
This is interesting to technical people because it means you can write the report one time and then sell it many times to many users of the operational system you are an expert in.
We believe this “Direct Query” using “Meta5 as a Black Box” sending CTEs into databases and then sending the resultant data into Excel / PowerBI is going to be a very large market.
No other product provides such seamless integration between Excel / PowerBI and complex CTE derived data as Meta5 does.
But don’t take my word for it.
Read the CTE from the button above.
And if you want to see it working for yourself?
We can give you access to our Meta5 Evaluation server and you can run the query for yourself.
Ok?
With that I would like to say thank you very much for reading our blog post today.
I really appreciate your time and attention.
Best Regards.
Mihai Neacsu.
Business Development Manager.
BIDA.
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